Why Resilient Teams Outperform Talented Ones, The Failure Advantage

Guest post by Matthew Egan, who is the author of The Failure Advantage: Why Setbacks Are Your Secret Weapon for Success,

I once had a team asked to fix something they had no business fixing.

They were in customer service. Their day was billing enquiries: people ringing because a charge looked wrong. And they were being asked to join a task force tackling a persistent back-end network infrastructure problem.

I thought someone had made a mistake. My team knew customers. They didn’t know infrastructure. There was a specialist team for that, and it wasn’t mine.

The Failure Advantage: Setbacks Are Your Secret Weapon

If I’m honest, I was mildly annoyed. I was being asked to hand over people to solve a problem that wasn’t mine either.

It was only later that someone explained the choice. They had asked for that team because they knew those people would keep working until an answer was found. And they did.

At the time I heard that as a compliment about attitude. I now know it was a far sharper observation than that.

In telecommunications, any given week might bring a network outage, a software update that broke customers’ handsets, the backlash from a marketing campaign nobody had warned them about, or people calling from bushfire zones wanting to know whether they would still have coverage.

Look at that list again. Every item on it is a failure.

Maybe not their failure but arriving at their desks, in volume, before nine in the morning. That wasn’t the exception in their week. That was the week.

They weren’t calm because they were clever. They were calm because they had spent years dealing with things going wrong and had learned that the queue moves anyway.

Here is the part I think organisations consistently miss.

Talent is built in conditions of success. You get good at something by doing it, well, repeatedly. Resilience cannot be built that way. It can only be built in conditions of failure. There is no other route.

Sim Sitkin made this argument back in 1992 – that failure isn’t an unfortunate by-product of learning but a prerequisite for it, and that it is small, frequent failures that build real adaptive capability, rather than the rare catastrophic ones.

Later work suggests how durable that learning is. Peter Madsen and Vinit Desai, studying decades of orbital launch vehicle programmes, found that organisations learn more from their failures than from their successes – and that what failure teaches them fades more slowly.

So, a team fluent in failure has been quietly accumulating a more durable kind of knowledge than a team that has mostly succeeded.

Brilliance is legible. It arrives in a meeting, attached to a name, easy to recognise and reward. Resilience is invisible right up until the moment you need it. And by then you cannot recruit it. You can only have built it – which means somebody had to have gone through the difficult years first.

Notice which team keeps getting pulled into other people’s hard problems.

Your organisation is already telling you where its resilience lives. In my experience almost nobody writes it down, and almost nobody pays for it.

I have watched that pattern repeat in several organisations since.

Talent wins the moment. Resilience wins in the end.

A smart person can get a moment in the spotlight with a bright idea. The team that has absorbed a thousand failures and turned up anyway gets the result.

When you are deciding who to put on the thing that is genuinely hard, the answer is rarely the cleverest people available.

Matthew Egan is the author of The Failure Advantage: Why Setbacks Are Your Secret Weapon for Success, a finalist in the Business Book Awards 2026 and endorsed by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn. The book explores how leaders and teams turn setbacks into a source of trust, learning and growth. Drawing on two decades in consulting and technology leadership, including at Microsoft, Matt writes about reframing our relationship with failure as a path to higher performance. Views expressed are his own.

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